Tougher transgender guidance for schools is unlawful, Sunak told

[Igneococcus]

Sorry can't do sharetoken on this device, I'll do one later if nobody else posts one.
Tougher transgender guidance for schools is unlawful, Sunak told (thetimes.co.uk)

What an utter mess this all is.

"Prentis said that a blanket ban would be unlawful because the Equalities Act states that gender reassignment is a “protected characteristic”, regardless of age. She gave the same advice when ministers asked whether there could be a ban on social transitioning for primary school children."

As someone pointed out above, the softening of language hides what's really happening so for that reason I won't use the term. Same as I won't pretend a man is a woman or use the term gender affirming surgery to describe surgically altering a body to superficially mock up the body of the opposite sex. The control of others starts with the control of language. If we need to dress this up to justify it, it's not just. If we can't call a spade a spade, people should stop digging. We all need to resist toilets marketing spin which the dangerous ideology is reliant upon.

@HipTightOnions

"Don't believe your lying eyes, kids. Billy has always been a girl"

"Miss, why do Billy's perceptions and feelings and wishes matter, and mine don't?"

"Miss, I like Billy and I want him to be happy, but don't believe Billy is a girl, why do I have to lie and pretend or get in trouble?"

Exactly

That’s the problem it only works if everyone is compelled to lie.

And that’s a society not far off 1984. It takes male violence and sanctions to get there.

It doesn’t work

So now what?

I agree with pp we’ve been talking about this for ages.

While social transitioning is something carried out by others to validate the child’s identity you also need to recognise the impact it has on the child. It embeds disassociation with their body which then leads to further dysphoria where it hadn’t existed previously- eg a girl might not have had issues with her breasts but as she wears stereotypical boys clothes, she realises her breasts make her stand out so she develops a need to flatten them.

Having others validate their identity serves to embed their belief they are right to believe they are actually the opposite sex- it’s extremely powerful,
particularly on the developing adolescent mind.

It is a psycho-social intervention and it’s important that we are able to name it. Yes, it has massive wider ramifications on society, particularly other children and if you want to give those ramifications a new name, by all means do so, but we need the term to accurately describe the intervention that individual child is undergoing.

That’s the problem it only works if everyone is compelled to lie.

Well the teachers can't be compelled to lie and tell children that Billy has changed sex as that contravenes the Education Act around political impartiality.

Schools have been breaching the law about impartiality ever since the DfE allowed Stonewall to move away from their very good work on homophobic bullying and to weaponise schools in their bid to remove single sex spaces for women and girls. The government have openly funded all this to the cost of ££ millions via the DfE and numerous other sources of government funding.

Dissidente · Today 07:53
The discussion about what social transition is seems to touch on a point that's been bugging me. It's that when a girl asks to be regarded as a boy, she is defining short hair, trousers, sturdy shoes as "boy stuff". (I provide the girls' side of a sex-segregated service.) All the girls who prefer short hair, trousers and practical shoes may then feel that their look is more boyish than it used to be.
In his way, stereotypes that we were rejecting throughout the 20th century are becoming entrenched again.
The reverse doesn't actually have a similar effect, because when boys put on dresses and makeup, there is no group of boys who wear dresses and makeup on an everyday basis. The only thing is long hair, but there are distinct masculine longhair styles. (Which, oddly, I have not seen any girls adopt in their bid to be regarded as a boy.)
So I do get @literalviolence when she asks what is social transition. It's a concept that requires us to reframe our social norms. It seems important to me to see it as an intervention which acts on the whole group, not only on the target individual.

I think you put this well about girls now feeling that short hair and comfortable boys’ clothes may be perceived as being more masculine than they once would have been.

A poster once mentioned that she has protections written into the ECHP for her autistic daughter, who likes short hair and comfortable clothes for sensory reasons, that no teacher or health care person is to approach her with any hint/suggestion of the idea she is transgender because of this.

The need to put this safeguard in place shows how extreme the effects of all this gender identity campaign/PR/Spin/Lie has worked into the consciousness of society.

It is odd to think how once it was perfectly common for girls of all ages to have short haircuts or wear boys’ jeans or even suits, whether for comfort or chic, without any sense that it could signal a change of gender.

rogdmum· Today 08:30
While social transitioning is something carried out by others to validate the child’s identity you also need to recognise the impact it has on the child. It embeds disassociation with their body which then leads to further dysphoria where it hadn’t existed previously- eg a girl might not have had issues with her breasts but as she wears stereotypical boys clothes, she realises her breasts make her stand out so she develops a need to flatten them.

Having others validate their identity serves to embed their belief they are right to believe they are actually the opposite sex- it’s extremely powerful,
particularly on the developing adolescent mind.

It is a psycho-social intervention and it’s important that we are able to name it. Yes, it has massive wider ramifications on society, particularly other children and if you want to give those ramifications a new name, by all means do so, but we need the term to accurately describe the intervention that individual child is undergoing.

Yes, absolutely.

This is interesting in referring to the word self ID related to children, as well as explaining the harm of affirming them.

This is what the expert Finnish Adolescent Dr Kaltiala said who is
”the top expert on pediatric gender medicine in Finland and the chief psychiatrist at one of its two government-approved pediatric gender clinics, at Tampere University, where she has presided over youth gender transition treatments since 2011”

I wish she were cited more here. Finland adopted the Dutch protocol and is now back tracking like England with the Tavistock and Sweden. She absolutely knows what she is talking about.

www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/finland-youth-gender-medicine

“Asked by Helsingin Sanomat what she thought of gender self-identification for minors—a proposed element of the new Finnish law that did not ultimately pass—Kaltiala emphasized that it is “important to accept [children] as they are,” but this means neither pressuring a child to conform to behaviors traditionally associated with the child’s sex nor “negating the body” by confirming that the child’s gender self-identification is real. “In either case,” said the psychiatrist, “the child gets a message that there is something wrong with him or her.” Evidence from a combined 12 studies to date demonstrates that when children with cross-gender or gender variant behavior are left to develop naturally, the vast majority—“four out of five,” according to Kaltiala—come to terms with their bodies and learn to accept their sex. When they are socially transitioned, virtually none do.”

A poster once mentioned that she has protections written into the ECHP for her autistic daughter, who likes short hair and comfortable clothes for sensory reasons, that no teacher or health care person is to approach her with any hint/suggestion of the idea she is transgender because of this.

Hi @ScrollingLeaves that was me 😊

I'm reading this thread with great interest. Lots of really good analysis from multiple angles. I really hope Gillian Keegan has stumbled upon it 🤞🤞

We use the safeguarding wording that got put in the EHCP in all settings with my daughter. The document itself only covers school, so our offline copy of that section is how we engage elsewhere e.g. health appointments, clubs.

It is almost impossible to express how difficult it is to keep bias away from my daughter. Out of a sense of kindness and inclusivity (and presumably in part to show how modern they are), so many adults on hearing the "gender neutral sounding" (nick)name that she uses to introduce herself and seeing her short hair automatically jump to the question "What are your pronouns?".

This question is problematic. It is a signpost towards a social transition approach because it's really saying "I can see you're female, but are you happy with that? Would you prefer me to think of you differently?". It's step 1 on the ladder of affirmation.

This is crucial for me in terms of protecting children

There are dc who do not conform at dc’ school

Thankfully they are still referred to with correct sex pronouns and also use own spaces. That’s important for those dc not forced to take on a lie but also incredibly vital for the dc. They are happy and no adult has intervened to say you are ‘presenting’ as another sex.

For anyone new to this, here's a clinical psychologist's take on how pretending to adolescents that their bodies are the opposite sex to reality sets up long term psychological damage & mental health problems. There's an equally powerful article about younger children on Transgender Trend's website:

https://www.transgendertrend.com/teenager-says-theyre-transgender/

How do we know if Gillian Keegan knows any of this?

Only a few years ago, a girl who preferred short hair, trousers and playing football was seen as a perfectly ordinary girl. Hardly anyone would have suggested, 10 or 20 years ago, that such a child was a transsexual.

At that time, gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder was seen as a medical condition which required professional diagnosis and psychological support to try to alleviate the person's distress.

Now we have a situation where adults (who really should know better) are suggesting to children that perhaps they have this medical condition, just because they don't conform to regressive stereotypes.

It's like an adult, on hearing that a child won't eat their food, suggesting to them that they might be anorexic and encouraging them to restrict their food intake further.

Sadly we don't. That's why I would advocate getting the guidance out as is with the fact that parents "should" be involved.
There is a lot to sort out in the background, including politicians in positions like Gillian's getting a real grasp on the issues.
I took her latest statement to mean that she had taken a positive step in this direction.

I suspect Victoria Prentis' advice is correct, given how open to interpretation the EA wording is regarding gender reassignment. However, it's so wide open that it means any "gender" should be validated (catself, horseself, moonself and so on) as a valid reassignment because there is no clear distinction between "sex" and "gender". So reassigning to a different sex could mean anything. Meanwhile, there is the Children's Act (as a PP has said above, liaison with parents is critical), the warnings in the Cass Review and... plain old common sense.

Her latest statement is a pivot in language towards the safeguarding of children. To me that suggests that her eyes are currently being prised open.

☝️ sorry, should have quoted this in my response.

Very interesting discussion.
Another point - as I deal with groups of girls and need to address them collectively, if I say "Girls, please can you do xyz" then I can see the facial expression of the ones who I've been told to address as "he". They feel invisible, in a way that they wouldn't if they hadn't been told they can expect special treatment.

Indeed. And each time someone feels discomfort, which is inevitable if they believe they have a gender identity which is different from their sex (while their physical body is inevitably developing).....the answer is to take another step along the journey to feel more comfortable. All the way up to medical intervention. Hence Cass stating that social transition is not a neutral act.

The first significant step within a social transition is a change in pronouns. It's a shift from being a boy with sparkly clothes or a girl with short hair to declaring you are no longer "aligned" with your physical body, and also declaring implicitly that your mental health hinges on everyone supporting this. At that point you're baking in an identity and the only way to maintain that belief is to take more and more steps to convince others that your gender identity is more relevant than your sex.

I agree. It does give me some hope that finally these critical issues about socially grooming children, free speech, psychological harm & undermining fundamental safeguarding principles are finally being spoken about at the top of the government. Until now, they have cluelessly funded and ushered in all the trans activist groups into schools causing such extreme damage to children.
The guidance is for consultation initially so why not put it out with a set of questions for the challenging issues? I'm sure I've seen this in consultations before.
What they must do is get something out to schools ready for September that signposts the danger points.

Millions of years of human evolution incl sex function/mating/appearance.

Thousands of years of social construction/society building, critically based on above factor.

Less than a decade of going against all this, crucially laid at the feet of children, who critically rely on instinct tempered by what they're taught, to make up for their lack of real world experience.

So, we let them down twice over.
Encouraging them to ignore the evidence of their eyes, to often go against what they're taught in science, what they instinctually "know" is right.

And to let this play out to its logical extreme, complete confusion and opening all sorts of easy paths for dangerous outcomes.

Unconscionable.

I’ve a former colleague, an ex-teacher, who works at DfE and said that the head civil servant there recently cited the Forstater case in an all-staff meeting. Which must be positive.

That's another positive small step. Getting the DfE's civil servants to stop centring trans activists and instead to prioritise the needs of children will be a major achievement. It's the capture of the DfE that has unleashed unhinged trans extremism on children & as RealityFan pointed out:
"So, we let them (children) down twice over.
Encouraging them to ignore the evidence of their eyes, to often go against what they're taught in science, what they instinctually "know" is right.

And to let this play out to its logical extreme, complete confusion and opening all sorts of easy paths for dangerous outcomes.

Unconscionable."

Very.

God bless Maya, she moved mountains for women and children with her case.

Thank goodness the Tories know what a woman is. Hurrah !

Sorry but this is just legally incorrect.

The fact that there are countries that have not complied with their international obligations doesn't mean that those obligations don't exist.

It is open to each country to determine whether they comply with international law or not - that's the nature of it, there are very few enforcement mechanisms.

But the UK - by and large - has decided to be a country that abides by international law. I think that is the right call. And the ministerial code and the civil service code are grounded in abiding by the law. So in the UK at least, there is no realistic means of repealing the GRA while remaining in the ECHR.